Data Encryption Techniques for USB

Abstract

Universal Serial Bus (USB) external devices are high speed flash/external drives which can boast data transfer speeds, about as large as 5Gbps. Host controlled USB is the fastest way of transferring material to an external device available today. It is easy, convenient and fast to access these USB devices as compared to other external devices such as CD, DVD, Floppy drive etc. USB is easy to use as they're plug and play devices and do not require any additional installation. The other big advantage of USB is that the data transmission is done at the same speeds, irrespective of the size of the data being copied. Thus USB and USB devices have become most popular interface standard for hardware connection. USB devices however lacks in security as any user can access the USB device and the data associated with it, leaving the data at huge potential risk. Thus to make the system more reliable and fast, we propose methods namely, Mutual Encryption and Key Match in order to provide security to the sensitive information on the device as well as to make the transactions or communication done using USB more encrypted.